Desire Makes Storytellers of Us All: Anthropica by David Hollander
What a fitting end to the postmodern literary experiment. Or are we just getting warmed up?
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Posts Tagged: vladimir nabokov
Setting Yourself Free: A Conversation with Alisson Wood
Alisson Wood discusses her debut memoir, BEING LOLITA.
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What to Read When You Want to Read Lolita
Alisson Wood shares a reading list to celebrate her debut memoir, BEING LOLITA.
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Rumpus Exclusive: “The Warning Bell”
“You are so sexy,” he said. I met his gaze. And the warning bell rang.
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Through the Translator’s Lens: Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough’s Objects of Affection
For Hryniewicz-Yarbrough, language provides a stronger connection with the past than nationality alone.
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The Family Novel
What you cannot put into words cannot become a lie.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #84: Susan DeFreitas
Picture this: a curbside juggler with a rose between his teeth. That’s the opening image of Susan DeFreitas’s powerful debut novel, Hot Season. Vivid (and sometimes strange) images strike again and again, conjuring ponderosa pines, cafés, old houses, and new characters. The book is firmly set in the fictional town of Crest Top, Arizona, and […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Jericho Parms
What is lost still has substance, is malleable, can take on new impressions, and be molded again to our experience, often resulting in the most lasting force that determines how we see the world.
...moreNabokov²
If Jesse Eisenberg plays you as a meddler in the personal affairs of geniuses, how do you respond? If you’re David Lipsky, you double down. His extensive review of Letters to Vera, a collection of Vladimir Nabokov’s letters to his wife, suggests that the couple’s lengthy marriage was the source of Vladimir’s steadiness in the […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Jeff VanderMeer
Jeff VanderMeer discusses the environment, his childhood, and the conception and conclusion of his Southern Reach Trilogy.
...more(Not Really) Pleased To Meet You
The narrative of the encounter between James Joyce and Marcel Proust gets another tile added to its mosaic. Over at the London Review of Books blog, Ben Jackson reports on the legendary meeting as told by Vladimir Nabokov to his wife Vera.
...moreObjects of Our Affection
Objects make for excellent writing prompts, Anca Szilagyi declares on the Plougshares blog. Objects can ignite memories or serve as a simple writing exercise tool. And objects within a narrative define how characters interact in a world. But be warned, there are dangers: Vladimir Nabokov writes of a curious condition. Whenever he inserted objects from […]
...moreThe Pleasure of Perfectly Positioned Punctuation
As conscientious writers know, punctuation can make all the difference in a sentence, sculpting mush into meaning or cluing the reader in to nuances of intonation. Vulture’s Kathryn Schulz has compiled some of literature’s most effective and memorable instances of punctuation, from Nabokov’s parenthetical “(picnic, lightning)” to the ellipses in T. S. Eliot’s “The Love […]
...moreNabokov vs. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
“When Nabokov started translating [his English-language memoir] into Russian, he recalled a lot of things that he did not remember when he was writing it in English, and so in essence it became a somewhat different book,” Pavlenko says. At NPR’s health blog, Shots, Alan Yu explores the controversial linguistic idea that the language(s) we […]
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The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov by Andrea Pitzer
Jason Edward Harrington reviews Andrea Pitzer’s THE SECRET HISTORY OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV today in The Rumpus Book Reviews.
...moreThe Copycat Lolita
A few weeks before Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita came out, the New Yorker published a short story about a man consorting with a young woman named Lolita instead of her mother—but this story was by Dorothy Parker, whose career was entering its last-gasp phase. Wait, what? Really? Vulture explains how coincidence, indiscretion, and “an opportunity to sting the current […]
...moreThe Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov, by Paul Russell
Sibling rivalry takes many forms. Whether it’s Bart and Lisa Simpson choking each other in front of the television or Cain concussing his brother Abel the outcome is usually the same– someone always wins. There’s always a favorite, a golden child. But what about those who are left second best? Often the arrow that doesn’t […]
...moreNabokov v. Wilson
Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson academically quarrel in a series of letters, written to assuage the pain of illness that was afflicting them both. They’ve got a shared “literary curiosity,” but the specifics of their understanding of Western literature reveal that they mostly just disagreed. Still, witnessing the correspondence of two intelligent frenemies is worth […]
...more“Writers die twice”
“Writing remains a very interesting job, but destiny, or “fat Fate”, as Humbert Humbert calls it, has arranged a very interesting retribution. Writers lead a double life. And they die doubly, too. This is modern literature’s dirty little secret. Writers die twice: once when the body dies, and once when the talent dies.” — Martin […]
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